Mask Your Email – Hide Email Address from Spammers

There are thousands of free scripts available on the Internet which marketers use to crawl different websites, forums, forms etc and try to harvest the email address of different people. This is mainly done to generate lists of email accounts which can be either sold or else which can be used for spamming and making money out of these. Most websites have a unwanted visitor, ie the email spambot crawlers which find your website through the Search Engines and who keep searching for any email address they find and add the same to their database. The best places where they can find the email address are comment section of blogs, forum posts, jobs listing sections, contact us forms etc where in people directly publish their email address and forget about the same, but later complaint their emailing services about the Spam they receive.

When ever you think about an email address you will find that there are three parts of it, which is name@service.com now lets break this and understand the logic behind this. The first part is the name you assign to your email address, something which is preferably your first name or your full name which can give others a idea on who is the owner of the specific email address. Next @ symbol is going to tell you that this is a email address and not a website URL, many people still get confused between these two. The final part is service.com is the email service provider which can be anything like yahoo.com, gmail.com, in.com etc

A sample email would be something like stevejobs@apple.com where in we are going to send a email to a person who has registered a email with the name ‘stevejobs’ and the email is hosted by apple.com website. The email spammers would start searching for all the address on the internet which have the @symbol and just add the whole email address in their database. Hence we need to fool them by providing a confusing email address where in we either add some extra symbols, words or characters which humans can easily recognize and understand the correct part. We have also written a article on reducing email spam by changing your name because spammers normally start spamming in alphabetical order.

There are different methods which you can implement to avoid email spammers find your email address and the first one for this is manual blocking. This can be implemented by publishing an alternative email address of yours on the Internet. There are many reasons you have to publish your email address on different websites, and this is where you need to add some extra text like the following which normal humans can easily find and understand the reason.

Original Email : stevejobs@apple.com
Email Address Invisible to Bots :
stevejobs at apple.com
stevejobs(at)apple.com
stevejobs AT apple DOT com
stevejobs@Remove.apple.com

You can also create any other format as shown above which can be easily understood by the humans, following which they can find the correct email and contact you, but the bots would either ignore these kind of address or else crawl up wrong address where all the emails sent would be bounced.

Another option is to use a Mask Email Image Generator service like this where in you need to just enter your email address and select a few options following which you get a your email address in the form of a Image which cannot be crawled by the email harvestors.

You can specify the Font, Font Size, Font Color, Background Color & Border following which the Image version would be instantly shown on the same web page which you can directly download and publish it where-ever you need to display your email address. This can easily stop all the spiders, robots, or spammers who send you a lot of Junk mail. Still if you need a email address for a temporary job then you can make use of a disposable email address.